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10 Macho Movies Every Man Should See

There's nothing wrong with a movie that explores a man's sensitivity. Except that they can be dull and annoying. Sometimes, you need an undiluted shot of strength, purpose, and violence to cleanse the palatelike the action star-studded The Expen

Aug 24, 2012

There's nothing wrong with a movie that explores a man's sensitivity, emotional growth, and personal reflections. Except that they can be dull and annoying. Sometimes, you need an undiluted shot of strength, purpose, and violence to cleanse the palate—like the action star-studded The Expendables 2, now playing in theaters. Here are 10 more movies that let viewers escape to a universe where violence, stubbornness, and self-righteousness are virtues, not sins.

1 of 10

Maltese Falcon (1941)

Sam Spade is the founding father of movie tough guys. The private eye, created by noir author Dashell Hammet and brought to flinty life by Humphrey Bogart, is an emblem of bedrock morals in a universe of sin and violence. Hard men, manipulative women, and skeptical law enforcement plague our hero as he pursues a rare statue. He gives and receives little sympathy. Bogey plays the role perfectly—you could bounce coins off his face and he wouldn't blink, yet he allows enough world-weary humanity to make the character more compelling. If it didn't hurt, Spade's choices would be meaningless.

Spade can throw and take a physical punch, but his real strength is an unyielding, uncompromising resistance to temptation that dooms him to a life of righteous choices and resultant loneliness. The takeaway: A good man in a bad world needs to be tough. Don't like it? Go blow. —Joe Pappalardo

Who needs a name when you've got a serape? While Italian director Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars popularized the spaghetti western here in the States and made Clint Eastwood an international star, it also relied heavily on Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, a tale of a ronin who pits two rival gangs against one another, as its source material. But Leone's followup, For a Few Dollars More is cut from whole cloth and presents Eastwood's "Man with No Name" with a more-than-formidable foil in the character of rival bounty killer, Col. Douglas Mortimer, played by the brilliant and menacing Lee Van Cleef.

Although the two leads are presented as adversaries from the start, Leone bides his time before having these two cinematic titans meet. It's well worth the wait, as each man endlessly sizes up the other in a staredown, followed by the inevitable exchange of hot lead. As is wont to happen in these situations, upon realizing that each has met his match, the two decide to team up to pursue their quarry—Eastwood for money, Van Cleef for revenge! —Carl Davis

Any macho movie needs the granite presence of Lee Marvin. In The Dirty Dozen he becomes a surrogate father to a gang of misfit/ degenerate/dead-ender soldiers in World War II whose path to redemption (in the form of commuted sentences) follows a suicide mission. The dozen include macho icons like Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, and Jim Brown. The mission itself—to infiltrate a Nazi castle during a party and butcher the unarmed guests—is suitably dirty.

Unlike war movies that pretend to higher glory, the mission and violence here is disturbing. But what makes the movie muy macho is the way the team members relate to one other before the mission as they try to earn the right to go. They scope each other out, beat each other up, cheat during war games and become brothers in arms. By the time the mission starts, you're rooting for them. Well, most of them—Savalas plays degenerate rapist "Archer Maggott" with creepy aplomb, but you never root for him to survive. —JP

Best exchange:
"You've got one religious maniac, one malignant dwarf, two near-idiots... and the rest I don't even wanna think about!" — Capt. Kinder (Ralf Meeker)

"Well, I can't think of a better way to fight a war." — Maj. Reisman (Lee Marvin)

4 of 10

Death Wish (1974)

The original "eye for an eye" film stars Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, just an ordinary Joe with a good life until some bad people do some really bad things to his family. They wreck his house, kill his wife, and rape his daughter. When the police do nothing, Paul decides to take matters into his own hands. His first weapon is homemade and elegant in its simplicity: a man's black dress sock filled with lots and lots of quarters.

What I've learned is that if you're going to walk the mean streets of NYC, do what I did at 13 years old and hang a sock filled with quarters around your belt. If you don't beat anyone with it, at least you have spare change for the homeless. —Anthony Verducci

Best line: "If the police don't defend us, maybe we ought to do it ourselves." — Paul Kersey

5 of 10

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Wait a minute—isn't Star Trek supposed to be for cerebral types who ruminate about a future where diplomacy, science, and compassionate humanity carry the day? Well, yes. But make no mistake, Wrath of Khan is an exercise in interstellar machismo.

Khan, played with bare-chested vigor by the amazing Ricardo Montelbahn, is a freshly-thawed-from-cryogenic-sleep product of 21st-century genetic engineering. He is the best man of his era. And his opponent is Adm. James Tiberius Kirk, the alpha male of his time. Khan spews phrases from the pages of Moby Dick as he pursues Kirk in a vendetta that involves cat-and-mouse intelligence operations and full-on spaceship battles.

The female element here is incidental—a young, smoky-eyed Vulcan whose plot importance is only to remind Kirk of his advancing age, and a scientist who birthed Kirk's son. Violent, quick-paced, and easily the best of the Star Trek films (especially the odious reboot), it boils down to a quintessential struggle between aging alphas, a macho movie cloaked in nerd-core perfection. —JP

Best line: "I don't believe in the 'No-Win' scenario." — Kirk

6 of 10

Predator (1987)

Predator follows the time-honored tradition of the supergroup, previously seen in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, The Dirty Dozen, and most recently in The Expendables: a seemingly invincible team of tough guys unceremoniously dropped into a meat grinder of overwhelming odds they must band together to overcome.

In Predator, a special forces team led by Arnold Schwarzenegger (in one of his most swaggering and effortless action outings) and populated by the likes of Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke, Sonny Landham, Richard Chaves, and Shane Black, are sent south of the border for a no-questions-asked black-bag cleanup mission at the behest of Carl Weathers, playing a perpetually sweat-soaked CIA operative. You know you've landed somewhere way over the macho rainbow when Apollo Creed himself is considered the weakest link in your organization.

Where Predator hip-checks the formula and tosses it on its ear is with the Predator itself, an alien hunter who has come to our planet in search of the deadliest game—man. Arnold watches as his team of muscle-bound mercenaries is whittled down to nothing, leaving him to face the superior killing machine man-to-alien, with only sticks, stones, fire, and his fists! —CD

Best Lines:
"If it bleeds, we can kill it." — Dutch

7 of 10

Stone Cold (1991)

Everything was bigger in the '80s—the hairdos, the shoulder pads (am I right, ladies?), and the action stars—until Die Hard and its hero, Bruce Willis' John McClane, paved the way for less macho, more blue collar on-screen heroes. Director Craig Baxley's Stone Cold, starring ex-NFLer Brian Bosworth, was the last gasp for the more-is-always-more genre, but as far as death rattles go, it was a doozy.

The Boz is a tough-as-nails cop who would make Sly Stallone's Cobra order off the kid's menu. He's assigned to infiltrate the Brotherhood, a degenerate biker gang led by Lance Henriksen's Chains, who plays the skeevy, menacing yin to Bosworths' mulleted, muscle-bound yang. When these two finally square off, it's one for the ages.

Stone Cold is an unapologetic repudiation of the thinking man's action aesthetic that was gaining ground at that time. Instead, the film sticks to its glorious B-movie roots and celebration of all things masculine, including the '80s macho holy trinity: muscles, mullets, and motorcycles! —CD

Best line: "Imagine the future, Chains, 'cause you're not in it." — John Stone

8 of 10

Hard Boiled (1992)

John Woo's masterpiece of bullets establishes a world divided into two types of people—master gunslingers and their born-to-die prey. They may die spectacularly, blown through windows by bullet impacts or crashing into walls on flaming motorcycles, but there's no escaping their fate. When the master killers square off, though, bullets fly without striking home. (Or when he does, the master shrugs off the damage).

The plot is pleasingly intricate, as is the case with some of the best Hong Kong action fare: Supercop Tequila is chasing a vile gangster, but unknown to him undercover supercop Tony is also closing in on the target. But Tony is in too deep, and makes casual contract killings a part of his cover. The gangster's hired superkiller, Mad Dog, is a wonderful addition to the mix. He's an amazing gunfighter, filled with disgust for Tony's two-faced ways, and only undone by a compassionate morality that emerges during the film's blood-soaked crescendo.

The film is rich with the kind of dilemmas that action heroes like Tequila face—a boss that doesn't support him, a bureaucracy that stymies his violent talents, a compulsion to pursue retribution at all costs, and a woman who just can't seem to connect with a ticking time bomb of aggression that she calls a boyfriend. No matter, this buddy-movie-on-steroids is hands-down one of the best action movies of all time. —JP

Best line: "Give a guy a gun, he thinks he's Superman. Give him two and he thinks he's God." — Superintendent Pang

9 of 10

300 (2007)

Part cartoon, part live action, and all bloodbath, 300 is a high-octane, eye-popping pillage of the historical battle of Thermopylae. Yes, a relatively small band of Spartan soldiers and their Greek allies stood up to tens of thousands of Persians. And Spartan culture was merciless, tough, and heavily militaristic. But like any good period piece, 300 doesn't get too bogged down in historical accuracy and forsake having fun.

The movie is heavy laden with a toughness-as-virtue ethos. It adopts the rough-hewn sensibilities of the Spartans as its own. Weakness and fear are afflictions, not human emotions. The Persians are shown as decadent, effeminate creatures. Spartan bonds of family, nation–state loyalty, and pride are on display. What's not on display are the homosexual bonds that soldiers in all Greek armies shared. But never mind any of that—half-naked men hacking and skewering opponents in slow motion while shouting inspirational slogans is as macho as it gets. —JP

Best line: "You have many slaves, Xerxes, but few warriors. It won't be long before they fear my spears more than your whips." — Leonidas

10 of 10

Machete (2010)

Could there be a better, larger-than-life macho man than Danny Trejo around which to build a modern-day action franchise for the disenfranchised? Trejo had a championship boxing career while serving time, and parlayed that experience into portraying big-screen brawlers for the past 25 years. Director Robert Rodriguez struck gold when he cast Trejo (who turned out to be his real-life second cousin) as the knife-wielding assassin Navajas in his 1995 film Desperado, and so began an ongoing working relationship.

When it came time for Rodriguez to shoot a fake trailer for Grindhouse, his grand exploitation collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, he called upon Trejo as his would-be leading man. Then Rodriguez decided to make it a feature film, and Machete was born. The movie takes the plot and situations only hinted at in the trailer and blows them up to Grand Guignol proportions, with the ex-federale Machete double-crossed by a crooked politician with an anti-immigration agenda and looking for revenge. Trejo and his grizzled physique square off against the squared jaws of silver-screen tough guys such as Don Johnson, Robert De Niro, and Steven Seagal. —CD

Best line: "Why do I want to be a real person when I'm already a myth?" — Machete

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